JobProx

I spied JobProx on Springwise. They are currently seeking investors through an Indiegogo campaign. 

JobProx relies on jobseekers downloading the apps onto their devices and then connecting with their LinkedIn profile.

I could see this working really well in controlled job seeking events such as information sessions, career fairs, conferences and mixers, since you are in a public place, thinking about work, not out in your pajama pants thinking about buying a quart of rocky road and wondering if you will have time to wash your hair today. I'm also not clear about how to turn the job seeking broadcast off and on. It might also need to remind you to update your LinkedIn profile and maybe suggest some keywords or skills to add to your profile.

I wonder how much tailoring employers can make for finding proximate, desirable job seekers. For example, at our career fairs, one employer might be looking for first and second year biology students for summer (temporary) employment and they have received specific funding that requires a candidate to be a returning student. On the other hand, a museum might be looking for summer workers and will take "any arts, any science, any education (as in elementary and secondary education)" and this second group of employers is also interested in those biology majors. How could you tailor your LinkedIn profile to bring you to the attention of both employers? The candidate has to provide an updated profile that includes this specific information, while an employer needs to be able to search by education and possibly specific year. However, based on this video, I would conclude that an employer can only search for candidates by app on, LinkedIn profile and breathing in the vicinity. Which I might be able to accomplish just as effectively with a T-shirt.

Still, this might be neat to test at an ALA placement event.

Use a Google Map to Find a Job

In the past, our centre has suggested using WalkScore if you need to find a job within walking distance of your home, but Career Services at Penn State Abingdon has created a very useful video about how to find a job using the Search nearby feature in Google Maps.


And don't think that people who want a job within walking distance are lazy; they have legitimate reasons to need a job close by. It is possible that they have family members (children or elderly relatives) who may need them in an emergency; They may not be able to afford a car/afford gas. We should not also not demand that people put their money into vehicles or gas when they are saving for a term abroad, or when they are using their savings so they can live without a salary when they take an unpaid internship that is supposed to help them move their career forward.

Apply with LinkedIn button

Since LinkedIn had it's IPO, the company has been rolling out several new tools. One of those tools is the Apply with LinkedIn button, which allows job applicants to for a position by submitting their LinkedIn profile

Follow Companies on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has had a Follow Companies feature for a while, and it means exactly that: follow companies and their updates within LinkedIn, without being connected to anyone in the company. Once you follow a company, you can see who in your network is employed at that company, and how distant your relationship is.

The image above shows a snapshot of the Harlequin company profile on LinkedIn. You can see a blurb about the company, information about anyone in your alumni group that is employed at the organization, as well as your LinkedIn connections to people in that company. Clicking on the Careers tab will also show any available jobs, as posted on Linkedin (though you are usually redirected to the company website for an application). If you explored the New Hires tab, you could see the profiles of new hires, as much as that user allows according to their privacy settings.

You can also see any employee traffic, such as position changes or promotions, that the user has recorded on LinkedIn, as well as links to mentions about the company in the news, as shown below.

For librarians, there are many libraries listed on LinkedIn, as well as publishing, software and tech companies, in addition to the universities and colleges, not to mention the many companies who may have a special library in your preferred industry, such as law, finance, manufacturing, or healthcare, just to name a few. It can't hurt to start monitoring their activity on LinkedIn.

However this is only the activity recorded within LinkedIn. For example, if a person does not update their profile when they move to a new company, you may not know if a company has made a new hire. The Follow Company feature still provides very useful information about organizations, their employee turnover, the number of hires that they are making, and indicates if you have anyone in your online network who could get you closer to a permanent or contract position or offer a recommendation.

TwitJobSearch

I realize that TwitJobSearch has been available since 2009, but results from their searches just finally appeared in my automated Twitter job search. So, yes, there are library jobs on this service and they include the obvious library job posters, such as  ALA Job List and LibGig. But they also get the infrequent tweeters, such as the small library or special library that infrequently posts or reposts jobs. Their dashboard also includes some interesting features that I think will help job seekers that are using Twitter:

• Email or RSS alerts for search strings
• A "featured accounts" setting, which either means they post lots of jobs that match your search terms, or they paid to be featured in relation to the keywords in your search. 
• You can click on a button to allow the employer to Skype you, or send a DM suggesting that you can take on the job. Now this is cool if you know the employer or industry wants to fill positions right now, such as PR, writing, programming, but it might make a library HR person pee their pants thinking that they are being cyberstalked.(And I am not kidding about this reaction: do you know how many library HR people I have heard get huffy about a job candidate that dares to call them to ask a question about a job posting--too many. Only for my sick amusement would I Skype them.) But this is an excellent tool if you are looking for a gig as a writer, book reviewer, community manager, or coding.
• And filters...which would be leave this Twitter search engine covered with awesome sauce, if they worked.

For example, a search for librarian includes the filters for "Engineer" or an "RN" and not as an employer or the name of the company, but for positions as engineer and a registered nurse. One content manager position came up, since you work as a "topic librarian". This was not in the job title, which the filter was supposed to search on. So the filters don't seem to do any filtering--and you need to get relevant jobs, before the successful filters of part-time/full-time or manager to work their magic.

The skills filter was also a little weird: what's a "COM", or a "PDF"? (No, there was no Adobe in that job posting.) It could be a translation issue, or it is possible there is a "collection management" hash tag that I don't know anything about--I guess a trip to Hashtags.org is in order.

Twitjobsearch does not tame the Twitter noise for job search, however, considering the alerts features and the assistance on finding good Twitter job sources, this vertical search engine will probably help people build up their personal Twitter for jobs list.

Job Posting Tracking Form

I mess around with Google Forms a lot (A LOT) and so I decided to update the Job Diary for a Library Job Posting Tracking Form.

I think it is really important to keep track of your own personal job search so you know

• Where the good or relevant jobs are so you don't waste time
• So you can use methods that are effective
• So you can give presents to the people who helped you
• It helps with hyperbole. I do believe that you are working hard to find a job. Do I believe that you have sent out a thousand resumes? No, I do not. And you shouldn't overstate your efforts either, especially if you are not applying as much as you think you are.

This form is public, so if you want to use the form, as is, I recommend copying and saving it in your own private Google docs account. This means that all of your spreadsheet data is kept private. And it also means that you can make changes to the logic of the form.

In this form, I have made two different "logic" choices:

1. To keep track of the friends or professors that are good sources of job postings. You can turn off the logic for this question or you can add more options for your tracking.
2. I am trying to keep track of which vertical search engines are relevant. However, you may never use vertical search engines, or you only use one or two. You can make those into separate options in this question and keep track of which Twitter feeds or which state library boards have the best jobs. It really depends on your job search.

You can also turn off some of the required questions if you don't feel they are necessary to your record keeping.

This form only keeps track of your research habits, not the success of your applications. I would suggest making a different form for that process.

I love forms because I hate making spreadsheets. I like how Google forms fills in all of the spreadsheet data for me, so I don't introduce spelling errors or what-not, and then I can look at the results later, or share the information with others.

Tracking your own job posting spotting will help you save time when you are really concentrated on your job search or when a position or contract is about to end and you need to go full speed ahead.

2011 Job Board Directory

AIRS and The Right Thing, companies that provide human resource recruiting solutions and training, have just released their 2011 Job Board Directory. If you maintain a list of job board links for your library or would like to look at some of the available job boards for a wide range of industries (special librarians, hey!) this is a useful resource.

JobPrize and other Job Referral Networks

Adding a financial incentive to job seeking and rewarding a connection is not new--there are plenty of companies that offer bonuses to employees that find a candidate that they can match to a currently open job, but JobPrize allows a job seeker to post a profile and offer a reward for finding the matching job.

The job seeker registers on JobPrize and offers a reward for the person who can find the job that they want. According to the About Us section of the JobPrize website, the job yenta should just be employed in the industry. Ideally, what I think they hope will happen is that an accountant at a hospital will make connections with nurses on the site because both work in the healthcare industry. They recommend the person to the position and if the match is made, the matchmaker can claim the prize.

I'm already detecting some problems with this: you don't know these people. This means they aren't in your network and you really shouldn't trust them.

• What if you end up recommending someone who lied about their education or ends up needing some serious anger management training? 
• Do you have to disclose your relationship to this person if HR calls you to find out why you recommended them? 
• What if the job seekers discloses how she found out about this position and it turns out you will be double-dipping: getting prize money from the job seeker and claiming the recommendation bonus from your employer? 
• How do you know that the job seeker, once they secure an interview, is going to be good for the bounty? The site states that the job seeker needs to put the prize into an escrow account, but how do you know if she really got the job--and owes you some money?
• What happens if the site is taken over by people who have better research skills (*cough* librarians) who spend their day finding job ads to match the people on the site, hoping to score prize money?

I don't mean to be a party-pooper but part of a network means you should trust and be trusted--which requires building a relationship, even if it is online. I won't undermine online networking, especially if you have done work for the person at a distance, but a referee should have some idea of your skills or personality and not put you forward because you offered them cash.

And guess what I found when I was searching on the topic? A patent filed for a job referral network system.

Other peer-to-peer job finding services:

• LinkedIn (via the referral system on their job board) 
• Ntroduction
  
• ReferYes
  
• TugLink

Spotted on Springwise.

Helping Job Seekers? Vertical Search Engines

The Points of Reference blog has a post on Helping Job Seekers and the one recommended resource is Indeed.com? That's it? That's the online job seeking source that Booklist could come up with for librarians that are helping job seekers? They could have at least linked to this article from the Searcher, The Info Pro's Survival Guide to Job Hunting, which even if it is a little dated, was thorough.

Not that I have any problem with Indeed. I actually like it and use it with our clients, but there are many other resources that might be better suited to this question. Maybe I just object to the title "Helping Job Seekers" as if this one resource will do it. Maybe I just need a cup of coffee. Anyway, there are more.

Vertical Search Engines

There are many vertical search engines, like Indeed, that scrape posting from major job boards or that accept feeds from employers. SimplyHired is another vertical search engine which has similar tools to Indeed, which includes the keyword and geographic descriptor mentioned in the blog post. They also have salary information, mapping tools and mashups with social networking software like Facebook and LinkedIn, so you can see if anyone in your network is currently working for the company.

These two vertical search engines also have a Trends feature that you can use to find out just how many of the jobs you are looking for are indexed in their engine.The Trends feature is meant to show you increases and decreases in job postings for a specific, title, region or keyword over time. If you take a look at the axis marked "Percentage of Matching Job Postings" you'll get an idea of how many jobs with that keyword are found in their database--or just how many jobs with that keyword there are available. Look at "librarian" compared to "engineer".

Librarian

librarian Job Trends

Librarian jobs

Engineer

engineer Job Trends

Engineer jobs

You can see just how many more jobs that mention "engineer" are available, as opposed to "librarian". That has to do with our economies, the types of professionals that are needed for each industry and sector, and just how many different flavors of engineer there are. (There are four distinct types of engineer civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical and more swirling sectors and specializations than what you could find at Baskins Robbins.) I just used it as an example to show that some vertical search engines will index more jobs of a certain type depending on where they scrape from and who's feeding them their feeds. This is something a librarian should consider when they recommend the search engine to patron: if you check the trends for "electrician" and compare by your state, one vertical search engine may have more postings than another and you may want to try another vertical search engine for your patron.

Other vertical search engines include Career Jet, Oodle, and JobCentral, which is a project of a consortium of employers to provide a place to post jobs for free.

SimplyHired is also messing around with a Local Search feature that is relevant to the job seekers that come into your library who need to find local work and who sometimes forget to add the limiting keyword of their homebase to their job search. Combine this search with a map and you can help someone who needs to relocate. This is the real power of a vertical search engine for job postings alone: it can look everywhere. At least everywhere or every sector it has indexed.

International Job Posting Vertical Search Engines

For Canadians, try Eluta. The result lists are smaller, since the board doesn't scrape but accepts employer supplied feeds only. I would also recommend WowJobs since it also includes Craigslist in its results, which is a great place for people to find a wide range of employment opportunities, especially work in the trades or short-term gigs. Yes, there may be job scams, but there were scams posted in the print classifieds; you need to educate your patrons about them.

Many of the vertical search engines mentioned have international channels of their search engine: Indeed, SimplyHired (click on the link marked USA below the location field to switch countries), CareerJet (click on Career Jet Worldwide for more information), Job Rapido and WowJobs.One of the reasons why I include the Career Jet widget on this blog is that is lets you search in different languages to get local results--I tested this on the Chinese version of the site to look for jobs in North America--which would be an asset to some library patrons that need a boost in English.

Indeed, though useful, is just the tip of the job posting vertical search engine iceberg. You should also make your decision for which vertical search engine is useful for your patron by asking them a bit about the type of work they are looking for, beyond I need a job. That's like responding to a patron's query of I need a book by just pulling the closest one off the shelf. Now, I know you're tempted to do that some days, but a little more questioning will help them find a vertical search engine that may lead them to some relevant jobs.

The Round-Up

• CareerJet
• Eluta
• Indeed
• Job Central
• Job Rapido
• Oodle
• SimplyHired
• WowJobs

SimplyHired New Grad Job Search

The vertical search engine SimplyHired has opened a new portal specifically for new grad jobs. Yes, it works for librarian.

In Canada, the vertical search engine Eluta, offers a similar new grad search filter, with Library and Info Studies in the Master of Science menu selection.

LibraryWorks

The LibrariansYellowPages and Library Associates, a recruitment firm, have partnered together to offer a job board called LibraryWorks. Currently all of the postings point back to LibGig, also a creation of Library Associates.

I don't know if their plan is to become a vertical search engine for library jobs or if this is just another way to drive traffic to their postings. The interface is clean and has a nice mix of jobs, but you can't sign up alerts or subscribe via RSS. It's early days, but so far days of meh.

DOL Job Tool Challenge

The Department of Labor is running a Job Tool Challenge to find the best online tools for job seekers. The submission period has passed, but you can vote on the tools that were submitted. Tools include social media tools, blogs, vertical search and job or career matching services. You can use these tools as a current job seeker or integrate them into your media instruction classes in libraries.

• The Project
• The Job Tool Challenge, for voting on the tools.
  

Jason Alba on Twitter

Jason Alba, creator of JibberJobber, also the writer for the JibberJobber blog, has a good post on using Twitter effectively. I agree: people are busy, they don't like technology, and there isn't a great deal of evidence yet that all of the effort put into job seeking on Twitter can actually lead to a job.

For librarians, using Twitter for information sharing makes sense. If you just happen to get a job out of it, double bonus points.

Use TweetDeck to update Twitter Job Searches

I'm still skeptical about using Twitter to find work, mainly because I have not met anyone personally who has found work via Twitter. But I did configure a search on TweetDeck (which I think makes plain Twitter functional) that may be helpful for those determined to prove me wrong.

Basically, TweetDeck is an app for Twitter that helps you manage your tweets. You can also run searches on Twitter, via TweetDeck and get pop-up updates if your search terms appear in Twitter. (These pop-ups are slightly annoying, but if you are Twitter-obsessed, perhaps you love their cheerful appearance.) Anyway, once you are signed in to TweetDeck or have downloaded it onto your desktop or iPhone, you can stay updated on your Twitter feed and get refreshed searches.

You can just type in your keywords/search terms, you don't need the hashtags because the search will send you posts where the search terms appeared, whether they have hashtags or. Since supplying a hashtag is voluntary on the part of the tweeters, this means you will get posts both with and without hashtags. (This, of course, can be good and bad, but if you are determined to use Twitter, you are determined to try anything.)

I would recommend running a Boolean AND, of the keyword for the profession you are looking for AND jobs, so you don't get the librarian saved my life tweets, or something about weird fantasies from people hanging out in the reference section (amazing what glasses and some smarts do to some people's libidos).

You can run several different searches, four displays nicely, but just remember that you will need to scroll sideways to view them all.

Now let's see if running searches on Twitter can actually lead to a real person, who will post a real comment that they found a real job--not just a posting or an interview, the full meal deal--through Twitter. I would prefer to hear from librarians and their successes, but I'll take anyone who can prove that Twitter got them employed.

Stalked off

Now, I know the article [Stalk your way to a new job] was tongue-in-cheek, but I don't recommend stalking individual people at an organization--you should follow news stories and items about an organization. If the people that work there happen to publish and you might end up working in their department, you should read their publicly available work. But staking out their Facebook page?

According to the article,

Within minutes, you can find out where he’s from, how to reach him, where he’s worked in the past, and – perhaps most importantly – what his favorite movie is. The more you know about him, the better your ability to sell yourself.

Not so fast. This depends on a few factors.

1. The person is online and is accessible. This mean that they keep their blog or their Facebook profile out in the public sphere on their own name. Lots of people don't.
2. Even if you think you have the right person, how do you know that you do? Plenty of celebrities have people who name-jack them (would that be Twitter jack?) but I know quite a few people who have misspelled potential colleagues names.
3. For librarians, many of us know where the privacy settings are. And we teach others where to find them.

A far more helpful post would have been how to find out information about a company and their prospects, especially for privately-owned or small firms not listed on the 500 that Fortune slavers over each year.

Paul Forster, Indeed's CEO, talks about Indeed

Total Picture Radio interviewed Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, about how Indeed works. Indeed, if you haven't used it, is a vertical search engine which "scrapes" jobs from major boards and allows you to search those boards from their interface. If you find something you like, you select the job and Indeed takes you to where the original placement of the job--like on Monster--and you follow the posting steps from their to apply.

The interview gives a good overview of Indeed and some of its features, like the Job Trends, setting up alerts, how the search engine lets you search by salary even if not every job posting includes salary information. I also learned about how sponsored jobs works--sounds a bit like Facebook's ads within the social network. They also talked a bit about job scams and phishers on the site and the steps that Indeed is taking to lessen the posts from scammers.

Which is how I found out about the interview, through a post on the Diggings blog which is powered by JobDig. The writer does make a good point that if Indeed didn't deal with places that harbor scammers, like major job boards that do no checks on job authenticity, scamming would be lessened, but that's like saying Google shouldn't return results that would include misleading information.

As a researcher, you should be aware that there are some vertical search engines that aggregate employer job feeds only, like Eluta and vertical search engines that scrape, like Indeed, SimplyHired and WowJobs. Taking employer feeds directly can indicate that these are real jobs--though you also get fewer results. (Researchers know less is more, desperate job seekers just get frustrated.) A submitted feed may also be inauthentic, since it is hard to tell if the search engine has someone who is investigating the authenticity of the the job feeds beyond the initial email of please add our feed to your results.

I think that including tools like map mashups or letting you discover how many times an employer has posted the job and for how long are other tools that will help you discover the authenticity of a job. If there is no mapped location, or the location seems suspect, it's probably not real--as in, using a post office box and not a company address to submit your resume, a tactic that was used by old school scammers that used print classifieds. If a job is frequently posted or runs forever, these are also tip offs that something is wrong, though it could just mean that the job has a high turnover rate, such as car washers.

The interview, however, is good and offers some insights to searchers using Indeed.

Dice launches Dice Learning

Dice is a job board for techy oriented positions--usually (but not always) programming--and they have now launched a learning portal called Dice Learning that will connect users with course offerings in technical skills--networking, security, PHP, for example. The courses are prepared by third-party providers, and it doesn't appear that you can register directly from the site; you need to ask for more information. (see the comment below: apparently you can register directly from Dice Learing)

They have webinars, seminars, and e-books. You can also find courses for certification, like CISCO or Microsoft. You can select from instructor-led courses or choose by state to find a course in your area. There was a dearth of free courses (I'm a librarian, I can use dearth in a sentence); even the skills assessment costs $2, but I was able to find a free course which will be offered on August 11 called Enhance your skills, which attendees can use to see what IT employers are looking for.

Dice Learning and Dice are mashing up the job postings on Dice with the courses on Dice Learning, so you can take courses in an area that matches the desired skills set. You can also rate courses that you have taken or make comments. You do have to have a profile with Dice to interact on the site. I think this type of mashup is very innovative and can help people who are trying to upgrade their skills or get into the labor market.

Spied on ERE.net

50 useful Firefox extensions for job seekers

JobProfiles has provided a list of 50 useful Firefox extensions for job seekers. Not all of them are specifically for job seeking, like BugMeNot, but some of these tools could be pretty handy for speeding up searching and purposeful surfing.

Spotted on CareerHub Blog

More Yahoo! Pipes

I've made some more Yahoo! Pipes which include instructions on how to modify them to meet your needs. Enjoy!

And if you make more, please comment and add the address to your clones or revamps.

New rules of job search

NPR's Business Story of the Day on June 17, 2009 was a story about the changing nature of job search. The tone isn't pro-technology so much as learn how to use web technology--especially online networking--better.